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[Robert Brockway]

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On Thu, 21 Aug 2003, David Duffy wrote:

> Even though I use SpamAssassin, I am getting fed up with all

What version is on the box at the moment?  About 6 months ago a bunch of
spammers assessed the algoritms in SA and wrote spam to get around it.
The SA developers countered by introducing changes to the algorithms (or
some other way, but they did get around it partially).  In addition spam
changes over time so it is periodically necessary to update SA.  If you're
using Redhat and say up2date, I'm not sure if (or when) RH will push out a
later version of SA rather than just providing security fixes.

There is hope however.  SA now includes a Bayesian filter.  This "learns"
what spam is and by most accounts has a better success rate at figuring
out spam than the traditional SA rules do alone.

Now for my personal experience: I tried to invoke the Bayesian filter in
SA recently but it ended up gobbling 512Mb of virtual memory and the user
process limiting I use killed it[1].  I have years of spam saved so I
guess the spam file I'm feeding it is a bit big.  When I get a chance I'll
try with a smaller amount (I'll get rid of spam from the start of the file
as I want it to learn about recent spam, not old spam).

There is also "bogofilter" which is a pure Bayesian filter.  When I get
the chance I'll look at this also.  Time is short at the moment as I have
2 personal Linux projects on the go as well as some non-computer projects
:)

[1] It grows quickly to 512Mb and I have no reason to assume the situation
will be any better if I give it more memory.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc. email: robert at timetraveller.org, zzbrock at uqconnect.net
Linux counter project ID #16440 (http://counter.li.org)
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens" -Baha'u'llah

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